


kintsugi

by faikitty



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, Nightmares, Post-Canon, Sleepy Cuddles, based off the show but works for the book too, honestly Crowley just went through so much shit he NEEDS A HUG
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 05:55:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19761970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faikitty/pseuds/faikitty
Summary: kintsugi: the Japanese art of mending damaged pottery with gold (or, how to heal a demon who is not broken - just a little bit cracked.)





	kintsugi

It always starts the same way.

Heat. Light.

It’s not the dank, ever-present humidity of the basement offices of Hell. It’s something older. Familiar. It’s heat that reminds Crowley of his Fall and the pools of boiling sulfur that caught him. It’s heat like sunlight bursting skin cells, making them multiply uncontrollably.

It’s _fire_.

Flames lick against Crowley’s fingertips; he snaps his hand back and braces his burnt fingers against his chest. If he had a pulse, it would be pounding wildly in his ears as dread settles low in his stomach, because he knows where he is now. He doesn’t need to look up. He knows what he’ll see.

Books. Rows and rows of books.

He doesn’t remember how he got here, but he remembers to be _scared_. That’s the logic of a dream; it can land the dreamer anywhere on Earth, and they’ll immediately start to play their role. Crowley plays his with the practiced ease of one who has lived this exact scenario over and over.

(He doesn’t remember _that_ , either. Each time feels like the first.)

“Aziraphale!” Crowley shouts, panic edging his voice up even as it roots his feet to the burning floorboards. There’s no point in calling out for his angel, but he doesn’t know that. He never does. “Aziraphale, are you here!? Where—!?”

A crash from behind cuts short his question. He spins on his heel, finally able to _move_ , to see the boards of a bookshelf giving way and plummeting to the ground. The fire snatches up the fallen books as fuel and soars into an inferno. It’s blinding. It’s deafening. It’s suffocating. The flames eat up his lungs from the inside out, each breath more and more difficult to take in.

“Aziraphale!” Crowley tries again, even though sparks have already begun to dance behind his eyes and his throat burns with the effort of making sound. “Where _are_ you, you stupid— _Aziraphale_!”

Wind gusts up around him from some unseen source. The flames kiss his soot-covered cheeks, and Crowley stumbles back and away. He lurches down a fire-lined corridor, scrambling briefly on hands and knees toward the darkness and away from the blazing central room. Something about the winding, never-ending shape of the hall strikes him as wrong.

“Azira—!”

Crowley chokes. The bookshop is a maze, and his lungs are too. He can no sooner find Aziraphale than oxygen can find _him_ amidst all the smoke. Crowley rounds a corner, hand pressed to scorched wood to brace himself, only to see books that may or may not be the ones he just passed staring back at him, their letters infinitely shifting. He huffs a frantic breath; his inhale comes fuzzy as carbon dioxide trips up his lungs.

The roar of the inferno echoes down the corridor, bringing with it searing heat. It bursts the eardrums of his body and plunges him into static silence, and Crowley is scared, because Aziraphale is not here. He _can’t_ be here; the books that contained Aziraphale’s soul far more than any physical body ever could are burning to the ground.

(It always ends the same way, too.)

Crowley falls. His toes catch on a floorboard and send him sprawling into a bookcase filled with fluttering, burning paper, papyrus and lambskin and parchment gone up in smoke. His skin blisters in the heat. His ash-blackened fingers curl around burnt pages that crumble in his grasp. Flames scorch his lungs, but he does not cry out for mercy.

He has never been granted it before.

It started with fire. It ends with it too.

* * *

Crowley wakes with a gasp.

He jerks upright, muscles straining painfully as he coughs out suffocating smoke that no longer exists—never _really_ existed in the first place. He fights to take in clean air through an open mouth, lungs burning. Eyes wide but unseeing, he folds in on himself, elbows curled around his knees, chest heaving and hands clasped to his shoulders as his nails dig crescent-shaped pain into his skin.

Something touches his back, and it takes Crowley several seconds to identify the shape as palms. Fingers shorter and broader than his own spread wide over the space where his wings once were. Quietly, a voice questions if he’s okay—soft, low, worried. Crowley allows his eyes to close as his mind finally connects those hands and that voice with their owner.

“Aziraphale,” he breathes, because of course it’s Aziraphale. It would never be anyone else.

Crowley lifts his head as the bed shifts. Aziraphale’s knee bumps against Crowley’s hip, and Crowley opens his eyes to meet Aziraphale’s. Before Aziraphale can ask once more if he’s okay, Crowley insists that he is. He drags a hand down his face, scrubs at his cheeks. Offers a wry laugh. A self-deprecating comment. A sarcastic remark.

Aziraphale’s eyes remain worried, oceans entangled. Behind him, a book lies discarded; its pages are crumpled beneath the weight of its binding from where it fell when Aziraphale hastily threw it down. Aziraphale drags a hand down Crowley’s spine, skipping over sharp vertebrae. With the other, he reaches up to brush away tears that Crowley didn’t realize had fallen, tears that would be cutting through soot were his dream a reality. He murmurs Crowley’s name.

And Crowley breaks, because this is what he thought he lost.

This is how a demon—one who does not so much _fall_ as saunter into Hell—comes apart: slowly, at first, small emotions slipping through chinks in his walls as a shaky exhale; then all at once. Pain rushes through the open floodgates, escapes as an open-mouthed sob he can’t bite back, and before Crowley realizes what he’s doing, his arms have closed around Aziraphale’s shoulders and his face is buried in the crook of Aziraphale’s neck.

“Oh, my dear,” Aziraphale sighs sadly, resting his cheek against the soft of Crowley’s hair. He draws Crowley into a warm embrace of his own. “Another one of those dreams?” Crowley’s fingers twist at Aziraphale’s shoulder blades, knot at his spine. He nods, only the barest of movements. “It wasn’t real. It’s okay.”

“I know.” Crowley is very quiet; his voice shakes with the effort of keeping it steady. “I know. I’m _fine_. I’m not—I just—” He takes a deep breath and tries to reign back both the words and emotions, but they slip out as his arms tighten around Aziraphale’s shoulders. “It _was_ real, and you were—you were _dead_ , Aziraphale, and I—I was—”

 _Alive. Alone_.

Crowley’s next stuttered breath rolls into a sob, blunted on the edges like an old sword. He muffles it against Aziraphale’s skin; Aziraphale holds him close.

“Hush now.” Aziraphale’s voice bears a faint reflection of the pain in Crowley’s. He wasn’t there. He didn’t see what happened. But he feels the aftershocks of it in Crowley’s trembling. “That’s all behind us. I’m here. It’s over. We _won_.”

It doesn’t feel like much of a victory, not with scars of the battles won still fresh in their minds and on their skin. Crowley can still taste the rancid sulfur of the hellfire the angels tried to use to destroy Aziraphale. He suspects Aziraphale can still feel holy water tingle against his skin.

That was the worst of it: the knowledge that their sides would have destroyed them. The knowledge that their sides would have _reveled_ in it.

But their sides no longer exist. They’re on their _own_ side now—on _humanity’s_ side. They have their scars, and their memories, and their pain, but they have each _other_ too. Crowley has his angel (warm, solid, and very much alive), and Aziraphale, his demon (falling apart and being put back together).

They have Earth.

“That’s it,” Aziraphale soothes once Crowley’s shaking eases and the painfully tight hold of his arms loosens. His fingers find Crowley’s hair and card through it. “It’s okay.”

Before everything happened, Crowley would have bristled into annoyance at the mere suggestion of pity. He would have snapped back that he doesn’t _need_ to be comforted. Now, it’s far easier for him to keep his face buried against the warmth of Aziraphale’s skin, breathing in not smoke but the smell of Aziraphale’s cologne, earthen and woody, and _him_ , all petrichor and old ink.

Crowley doesn’t have to acknowledge the comfort, but he’ll accept it.

“Tell me,” Aziraphale murmurs, fingers stroking slowly through Crowley’s nightmare-mussed hair, “why on earth do you still insist on sleeping if you know this will happen?”

 _Because I know I’ll wake up with you next to me_ , Crowley doesn’t say. He swallows hard instead and exhales quietly, breath hot against Aziraphale’s neck. “Nightmares make the real world seem full of teddy bears and rainbows instead of gloom and doom.”

Aziraphale sighs, the sound equal parts fond and exasperated. “You certainly have a cheery way of looking at things,” he says wryly, and Crowley grins against his skin despite the wet still clinging to his cheeks.

“That’s me, angel. Just a ball of sunshine.”

Aziraphale unthreads the fingers in Crowley’s hair and presses a gentle kiss to his temple. “Would the ball of sunshine mind releasing me for a moment?”

The ball of sunshine does so.

Crowley leans back and allows Aziraphale to disentangle himself from his long limbs. Crowley’s hand hovers close to Aziraphale, reluctant to let go completely—then he draws it back as well to smudge at the tear-streaks drying on his cheeks. His face burns beneath it; he isn’t accustomed to Aziraphale seeing his weakness.

Aziraphale, busy scooting back in the bed and feeling for something on the floor, doesn’t seem to notice. Salt still stings the edges of Crowley’s eyes, but he blinks past it to watch Aziraphale settle in against his pillow. The mattress creaks, and Aziraphale finds what he was looking for with a pleased “ah!” He scoops up his abandoned book, miracles the pages smooth, and glances up expectantly at Crowley, one arm spread. “Well?”

Crowley doesn’t hesitate.

He sinks down in the bed, snaking his arms around Aziraphale’s thighs and resting his cheek against Aziraphale’s stomach. He tucks his face in against him; the worn cotton of Aziraphale’s (hideously tartan) pajamas tickles his nose, but Crowley isn’t about to move. The sharp corner of the spine of the book presses into his shoulder.

Aziraphale clears his throat and begins to read.

“’There is something truly evil about plaid,’” he starts, and Crowley snorts a laugh, jarring the book.

“That’s for sure,” Crowley agrees as he closes his eyes.

Aziraphale _tsks_ at him. “I am _reading_ ,” he scolds. “It’s a book. Not my personal opinion.”

“Doesn’t make it any less true.”

“Are you going to allow me to read or not?”

“You don’t _need_ to read to me in the first place. I’m not _Warlock_ ,” Crowley complains, but his eyes remain closed and he interrupts his next statement with a yawn. He tries again. “I’m not a kid who needs a bedtime story.”

“No, but you will take one nonetheless,” Aziraphale says firmly, and he continues reading.

“’It might look like just a crisscrossed grid of colors, but in my experience, much like comets and black cats, plaid is a harbinger of doom. The amateur bagpiper who played at my grandpa’s funeral wore plaid. The scratchy suit I was stuffed into three Christmases in a row was plaid. Dad’s boss, who promoted Dad and is therefore ultimately responsible…’”

The words quickly fade into background noise. Exhaustion weights Crowley’s limbs and slows his mind. His body grows lax against Aziraphale’s; he’s never more at ease than when he’s with his angel. Aziraphale’s voice is as warm and soft as the rest of him, and Crowley thinks he understands how Aziraphale was always able to do both temptation and miracle without trouble. There is something in him that allows him to persuade Crowley to rest in his lap, and there is something in him that fixes Crowley’s hurt. Something honest. Something forgiving.

Crowley’s mind slips away, and his dreams are the quiet of Aziraphale’s voice.

**Author's Note:**

> sorry for not writing for, like, two months. my life has sort of fallen apart, but these fools are keeping me alive.
> 
> thanks as always to my other favorite fool, Freddie for beta-ing, and for being the Aziraphale to my Crowley. the book Aziraphale is reading in the end is "Heretics Anonymous" by Katie Henry since it's their favorite book (and also because Aziraphale being forced to say "there is something truly evil about plaid" is hilarious to me).


End file.
